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Oftentimes the Indigenous and farmers’ organizations form the backbone of the popular mobilization capacity of these alliances because corporate globalization threatens not only their wages or their health care but their entire way of life.

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My family had moved to Detroit from the South for the opportunity, but opportunity moved away. Not arbitrarily, but through planning...

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"Growth only measures the destruction of nature and counts people’s economic output to convert it into commodities and cash." — Vandana Shiva

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"We had to fight the City to not allow developers to tear it down and to put local hiring in place to make sure that residents will benefit.”—Margaret Gordon

In this issue of RP&E, we explore how the places we call home are being transformed by development and globalization. Community organizing and the environmental justice movement have always been about place, starting in our own neighborhood and taking on the big issues where they impact our daily lives.

Alive!

Arise!

Dozens of U.S. cities erupted in direct action protests following the decision to grant impunity to police who killed Michael Brown in Ferguson and Eric Garner in New York. A new generation of organizers is arising, willing to take risks and break the rules to make social change. They are mounting effective action at street level and building broad coalitions, challenging existing institutions and creating new ones. (Garza, p. 66)*

To have any hope of solving the twin crises of accelerating environmental degradation and growing economic inequality, we have to reimagine some fundamental assumptions in both the domestic and economic spheres: What is work? What is leisure? What is labor performed in our homes? How, as a society, do we organize our domestic and work lives so that we can meet our fundamental material and cultural needs?

The confluence of the Occupy movement and demographic change is shifting the public discourse about class and race and breaking ground for new political spaces. In the tumultuous months since the February 2011 takeover of Wisconsin’s Capitol, Occupy Wall Street as well as actions at stockholder meetings of banks and protests by university students and faculty have shed light on who owns our wealth and how they use it. (Baham)* The failure of the recall effort in Wisconsin emphasizes the urgency of constructing new spaces in which our majority coalitions can come together outside the constraints of corporate-dominated political parties to develop creative and effective strategies.

Vol. 18 No. 2 - 2011)

Autumn Awakening
From Civil Rights to Economic Justice

The Autumn Awakening underway across the United States is an inspiring moment of hope after decades of overt social, political, and economic reaction. The arrival of the Occupy movement was heralded by the student-worker-citizen occupation of the Wisconsin state capitol last winter. But just a few months ago, a sign bearing the words, “If Egypt can do it so can we” signaled a plaintive cry more than a compelling mandate. The formulation, “We are the 99%” articulates a new, broad-based democratic politics focused on economic justice. While the slogan is by its nature inclusive, the emerging movement is still coming to terms with the fact that the majority of the 99% are women and people of color. (See On Occupy, page 75*) In this issue, we take a look at how the changing demographic complexion of the United States is shifting the political calculus in many arenas—electoral, economic, and in the new movement called Occupy. Driven by displacement and gentrification (Bullard) and in search of jobs, housing, and education, African Americans, once confined to the South and the urban core, are on the move (Sullivan, Kromm). Some see the departure of African Americans from the cities as a threat to the community’s political power, while others see new opportunities for people of color to build a historic new coalition. [More]

As the United States draws closer to becoming a nation with people of color in the majority, it is also moving into an economic and social program of privatization, cuts in social programs and real wages, restrictions on unionization, a focus on investment in export industries, an emphasis on balanced budgets, and a re-valuation of its currency. In most of the developing world, this program is called “structural adjustment.” It is a bitter remedy often prescribed by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund after economic speculation and the looting of national wealth by a narrow elite has driven a country into near or actual bankruptcy.

As RP&E enters its 21st year of publication, we bid a fond farewell to Juliet Ellis, our publisher, who has been Executive Director of Urban Habitat for the last nine years and with whom we have worked since 2005. Each of those years has brought new developments to the journal and this year is no exception. We are changing our format from a single thematic focus for each issue of the journal to broader continuing coverage of racial and gender justice, economic justice, environmental and climate justice, and regionalism. With this expanded capacity we will be able to track the advances, setbacks, solutions, and conundrums facing our movements on the ground without the long hiatus between special issues that has sometimes left our readers asking, “When will you be doing another special issue on…?”

In this issue we celebrate our 20th anniversary with reflections on the social and environmental justice landscape from 1990 to the present. When the journal was founded, the EJ movement was just beginning to be heard on the national stage. A succession of intense local struggles around the siting of toxic facilities in communities of color had brought the impacts of racism back into public view.

I started this issue as a skeptic of climate change. I didn’t doubt its reality the human contribution to it, or the threat it represents to the ecological health of the planet but I doubted that this crisis created an organizing moment that could benefit low-income people and communities of color. When Race, Poverty and the Environment covered this topic in 2006, efforts within the United States to organize in response to climate change were scattered and largely led by white environmentalists. We had to turn to a Canadian author to find a succinct description of a framework for green economics.

When President Franklin Roosevelt addressed the United States Congress in January 1941, he called for “a world founded upon four essential freedoms”—freedom of speech and expression, freedom of worship, freedom from fear, and freedom from want. Popular conceptions of rights at the time moved beyond the constitution’s narrow framing of civil and political rights to include basic social and economic rights. In this issue of Race, Poverty and the Environment we take a look at the kind of organizing needed to win social and economic rights for all.

The election of Barack Obama represents a turning point in the role of race in United States politics....

Unfortunately, the election in itself does very little to challenge the economic and social system that inflicts racism on vast segments of the people in this country. To make change, our movements will need to maintain consistent grassroots pressure on the new leadership. But we also need to deepen our understanding of how racial inequality is maintained. Furthermore, we need a solid theory of how and where we can redistribute opportunity so that communities of color and low-income people can gain their fair share of benefits and remedy past wrongs.

Who owns and who controls our public resources and how has the dividing line between public and private shifted over the last century?

Roads, ports, parks, schools, libraries, community centers, public housing, government buildings, military bases, and digital rights of way are all nominally controlled by democratically elected bodies that are mandated to act in the public interest. But across the nation, a pattern of economic exploitation of public resources for private gain has undermined public control of these resources and increased the divide between rich and poor.

This summer's United States Social Forum was singularly successful in its use of popular education, holding over a thousand workshops in three days. This issue of Race, Poverty and the Environment opens with a quick look at the forum and then delves into the many complex ways people are using education to strengthen the movements for social justice...

One doesn’t have to possess an advanced degree in economics to see that there is something definitively out of alignment when it comes to job creation in the United States. Multinational corporations with no national, much less local, allegiances are given billions of dollars in tax subsidies in a shell game, which moves an ever-shrinking number of manufacturing jobs from city to suburbs, and state to state....

Climate change threatens all forms of life on planet Earth, but when it comes to human life, it is the poor communities that will be hit first, and hardest. Human-caused climate change is now accepted as a reality, even by the mainstream media. But the effects of climate change on our communities are still covered only intermittently; and ideas about how we can organize for positive change are almost never covered at all...

This issue of Urban Habitat’s journal, Race, Poverty, and the Environment, presents an analysis of transportation equity that can help build the movement for civil rights and environmental justice. Featuring contributions from leading practitioners in the field and a cross-section of voices from the grassroots, it reveals a transportation and land use system that harms urban quality of life; damages the planetary environment; promotes wars for resource domination; and supports racism and class-based segregation. Published on the 50th Anniversary of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, this issue ...

What are the legacy and limitations of science, research, technology and public health methodologies that underpin environmental policies? How has dependence on existing paradigms of science perpetuated environmental racism? To protect our communities, the EJ Movement must engage in the debate.

"The word “imperialism” is back on the radar of political discourse, after lying dormant for many years, thanks to the Bush administration’s willingness to throw the weight of the United States around with abandon. Imperialism is a useful word. Just as the concept of “internal colonialism” was helpful to people thinking about power and injustice in the 1960s, imperialism can be brought home to good effect for today’s activists and movement leaders. But as an analytical term...

As Californians recover from the tumultuous gubernatorial election in our state while also looking ahead to the 2004 presidential election, the issue of electoral politics looms large. The question is: how do activists and organizations struggling to promote equity in low-income communities and communities of color incorporate electoral politics into our work?

This issue of Race, Poverty and the Environment both celebrates the EJ Movement and offers a critique of it. At this critical point in EJ history, RPE takes a big-picture look at the Movement's past, present and future. In the "Looking Back" section, three articles explore the relationship between EJ and the Civil Rights Movement, examining lessons learned from liberation struggles of the 60s and 70s, as well as failures and missteps to avoid ..

Gentrification, the wrenching process of neighborhood change, was first named in the 1960s. The name, however did not acknowledge the permanent erasure that takes place when a community loses its memory. Gentrification, orurban blight were policy terms that carried social and racial values, as well as a political and economic agenda. The layered meanings of the language of redevelopment has been understood by many communities that have fought to remain intact...

By current estimates, there are nearly half a million brownfields, or derelict and possibly contaminated sites in our cities. These abandoned places, in many cases still leaking toxic chemicals into land, air or water, are most often concentrated in low income communities where the majority of residents are people of color. Compounding the health threats posed by the brownfields sites, these communities are also...

Food is something many of us take for granted. Supermarkets are open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, stocked with foods shipped in from all over the world, providing us with the illusion of health and abundance. We do not often stop to consider where that food came from, whose hands harvested it, how it was grown, and whether it is safe, equally available to all, and produced in a manner that does not degrade and destroy resources and communities..

Steel walls. Military-style attack raids. People hunted down to be beaten, and sometimes killed, by government agents. Politicians speaking the language of ethnic cleansing. This description is not of Northern Ireland, Palestine, or Bosnia. Instead it is a picture of the United States/Mexico border...

Multicultural environmental education is not merely environmental education with multicultural populations or "audiences" nor is it "urban environmental education with multicultural populations." It is rather a very new kind of environmental education, where content is influenced by and taught from multiple cultural perspectives..

Our transportation system can tell us a lot about U.S. society. It can tell us about racism, economic injustice environmental stresses are exacerbated, leaving those most and environmental degradation. The patterns of our complex historical development as a nation - economic, social, cultural, political, environmental – are embedded in a transportation system many people take for granted...

U.S. Army General Leslie Groves and nuclear physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer designed the Manhattan Project according to the military model: secrecy was created and sustained by compartmentalizing every phase of the work. The Project that produced the first atomic bomb was spread over thirty-seven installations scattered across the United States and Canada, each an isolated unit providing only a fragment of the bomb-making process....

Submissions
We welcome participation from writers and organizers committed to using a race, class and gender analysis in their work. Letters to the editor and articles that meet our submission guidelines may be sent to: reimaginerpe [at] gmail.com or by postal mail to:

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